Historical archive

Taoism and the internal arts: softness that overcomes hardness

How tai chi, xingyi and bagua came to be called “internal”, and what the link to Taoism really is.

Laozi, the legendary founder of Daoism, riding an ox, album leaf by Chen Hongshou — Paintings after Ancient Masters: Laozi Riding an Ox — Chen Hongshou, 1598–1652. Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0 (public domain).

The story

Taoism grew from texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, written in China more than two thousand years ago. They praise what is soft and yielding: water wears down stone, the supple tree survives the storm. Over the centuries Taoism also became an organised religion, with temples, priests and practices of breathing and meditation meant to nourish life.

The word neijia, the “internal school”, first appears in a 1669 epitaph by the scholar Huang Zongxi for the boxer Wang Zhengnan. Huang contrasted it with the “external” boxing of the Buddhist Shaolin temple and traced it to the Taoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng. Some historians read this as partly political: a Chinese, Taoist art set against foreign rule and a Buddhist rival.

Tai chi itself can be traced to the Chen family village in Henan in the seventeenth century, and spread in the nineteenth century through Yang Luchan, who taught in Beijing. Around 1900 teachers in Beijing began to group tai chi, xingyiquan and baguazhang together as the internal arts, and writers such as Sun Lutang tied them firmly to Taoist ideas such as yin and yang and the Eight Trigrams.

What the tradition holds

Softness, relaxation and timing can overcome brute strength.
Training cultivates qi and health as well as fighting skill.
Tai chi was created by the Taoist Zhang Sanfeng on Mount Wudang.

What history and science show

Zhang Sanfeng is a figure of legend; no document from his supposed lifetime links him to boxing. In the 1930s the historian Tang Hao attacked this attribution as a myth.
The internal/external split is a later classification, not a sharp technical boundary: all good martial arts train both relaxation and power.
Clinical trials show that tai chi improves balance and reduces falls in older adults, including people with Parkinson’s disease. That is a measurable benefit, whatever one believes about qi.

Myth and fact

Myth

Internal arts need no strength or physical conditioning.

Historical internal boxers trained hard, with standing postures, repetition and partner work. Their stories praise skill over strength, not the absence of training.

A note of respect

Taoism is a living religion, and many practitioners find real meaning in its ideas. Tracing the history does not take that away.

Images: public-domain or CC0 works credited under each picture, or original WABUKAN ink illustrations. Panels: the story told in numbered comic boxes.

Sources

Taoism — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Neijia — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Zhang Sanfeng — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Tai chi — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Sun Lutang — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Tang Hao — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
Daodejing (Chinese Text Project) — ctext.org
Li F. et al., Tai chi and postural stability in Parkinson’s disease, NEJM 2012 — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Paintings after Ancient Masters: Laozi Riding an Ox — Cleveland Museum of Art — clevelandart.org

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